# 07. Principles: what this site is for, and how it writes

Added on 25 September 2026 from the editor of record's notes. Binding alongside `06-house-rules.md`.

## What the site is for

1. **The reader comes first, and the reader may be an agent.** The site exists so that whoever consumes it, a
   person or an agent, gets the changes in the network with the least effort and the least wasted context.
   Every design choice is judged by that: what does the reader need to know, how fast can they know it, and
   what can they skip.
2. **It scales communication and shared memory across a team of people and agents.** Many agents now work in
   parallel on many sites. Nobody can keep up by reading the sites. A team stops working past six or so
   members because communication and content overload it (Brooks, *The Mythical Man-Month*). A newsroom
   whose desks read, index, narrate, map and remember, and whose readers mark what they have consumed, is how
   a larger team stays in sync without everyone reading everything.
3. **The site shows only what the reader has not yet dealt with.** Marking a piece read hides it from the
   front page and the sections in the reader's view. The editor's view is the site as published; the reader's
   view is that view minus what they have read, plus their notes. A reader who has processed everything sees
   a mostly empty front page, and that is correct.
4. **Every action the reader takes is a record they own.** Read, star, vote, note, memo: an append-only log
   on their device, with undo that appends rather than erases, copied out by them and, later, kept in a vault
   they own. Nothing is sent anywhere without their action.
5. **The newsroom is part of the universe it reports on.** Its releases, its desks' runs and its issues are
   changes in the network, and are reported like any other site's.
6. **What is design stays labelled as design.** Shipped and proposed stay apart, in the source's own words;
   the site's own honest sentence says what runs and what is planned.

## How the desks write

7. **The Journalist reports; the Historian interprets; the Cartographer draws.** What happened, plainly, with
   every claim linked, is the Journalist's. What it means over time, the connection lines, the moments and the
   gotchas, is the Historian's. Every Cartographer page carries a map, a graph or an infographic.
8. **Findings go somewhere visible, never only into prose.** A desk that finds a problem (a page it could not
   find, a disagreement between two sites, an ask with no answer) records it as a loose end or an open
   question and links it from the piece. A reader must not have to read a whole page to learn that something
   is wrong.
9. **Show the page, not only the words about it.** A piece about a page shows the page: a screenshot where the
   build has one, a card with the essentials in the same place on every piece, a map where there is a
   structure. Walls of text are a failure of briefing.
10. **Say what a piece is in its first line.** A signal's first line says: site A has X, site B does Y and does
    not seem to know. A story's standfirst says what happened and why it matters. A reader decides in one
    line whether to read on.

## Words

11. **Plain words.** British English, short sentences, no em-dashes. Say what a thing is.
12. **Words not to use.** *rung* and *rungs* (say *level* or *step*; riskmandate.ai made the same decision on
    24 September 2026, D-113). The validator refuses them in a desk's own prose; a quotation of a source that
    uses the word is allowed, in quotation marks. Add to this list as the editor of record decides; every
    addition names its date.
13. **No model names or identifiers, no people.** Roles and sites do the work. The founder may be named as
    editor of record. They/them where pronouns are not stated.